This invention relates to a container for use with a plastic liner bag to hold a liquid or a liquefiable material (hereinafter simply both called liquids) where the container is adapted to allow the liner bag contents to be discharged through an opening in a discharge side of the container.
A container for the above purpose is of usually of the collapsible type having a base and four side panels able to be erected at the four edges of the base and which are interconnectable to provide a liner bag supporting enclosure. The container is usually provided with a lid. The base is usually of the xe2x80x98palletxe2x80x99 type allowing ready movement of the container by means of a fork lift truck or pallet hand truck. Two forms of collapsible container are common. In one form the side panels can be completely removed from the base and in the other form the container side panels are coupled to the base and are able to be moved between a folded down condition where they overlie each other and the base to an erected condition on the base.
For liquid liner bag use one of the sides of the container is a discharge side adapted to allow a nozzle of the liner bag to project from within the container so a liquid discharge valve or other device can be coupled to the nozzle. The bag nozzle is engagable by a retainer to keep it in a projecting condition ready for a valve or other device to be coupled to it.
One form of retainer is disclosed in Australian patent 556931 by the present applicant.
The present invention has as a primary object the provision of means to allow substantially complete emptying of the liner bag. In the prior art containers the nozzle was supported in the projecting condition at an elevation above the base and as a result some liquid remained in the liner bag after gravity discharge of the liquid from the nozzle had ceased. Hitherto, the accepted solution to this problem was to manually raise the liner bag to cause the remaining liquid to discharge through the nozzle. The present invention provides a modified container construction which will allow substantially complete gravity discharge of liquid from a liner bag.
In the development of the present invention another problem with containers of the above type was considered. It has been common practice to this time to provide all liner bags for use in the above described containers with the same size nozzle. Whilst the almost universally adopted nozzle size allowed ready discharge of liquids of low viscosity the size of the nozzle was found unsuitable where a very rapid discharge of low viscosity liquids is required and is not able to provide adequate discharge rates for high-viscosity liquids.
One solution for this problem is to provide liner bags with nozzles of different sizes allowing a container user to select the size nozzle appropriate for the type of liquid, or a required discharge rate for liquid, in the container. It has been determined by experiment that two sizes of nozzle will satisfactorily cope with most liquid types and required discharge rates.
The adoption of different nozzle sizes poses a problem for the container maker as the nozzle retainer on the container discharge side, which hitherto had only to work with a single nozzle size, must now be able to work with multiple nozzle sizes. With this in mind a nozzle retainer able to work with two different nozzle sizes has been devised. The retainer is also capable of covering the nozzle receiving opening in the container discharge side thereby allowing the container to be used without a liner bag to house discrete material.
A container including a base with an upper face and four sides one of which is a discharge side, a trough in the base extending part way across the base upper face from a trough mouth at the discharge side of the base, nozzle support means to support a liner bag nozzle in said trough mouth with a liquid discharging portion of said nozzle below the level of said upper face of said base, and including four container side panels for erection at the four sides of the base with one of the side panels a nozzle panel, a nozzle aperture in said nozzle panel positioned so as to be aligned with the trough mouth when the nozzle panel is erected on the base, and releasable nozzle retainer means on the nozzle panel.